Nov. 29, 2010
Infosys co-founder and celebrated Bengaluruean Nandan Nilekani and national security adviser Shiv Shankar Menon figure in Foreign Policy magazine’s list of ‘Top 100 Global Thinkers’. The list, in its second edition this year, recognises people who had “the big ideas that shaped our world in 2010”.
Mr Menon, who is at No. 18, has been credited with “dragging India out of its global non-alignment”, while Mr Nilekani, now chairman of the national ID project Aadhaar, has been recognised for the ideas he enunciated in his book Imagining India.
They are in elite company here, including Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, US President Obama, several economists such as Nouriel Roubini, Paul Krugman, Raghuram Rajan, Joseph Stiglitz, Martin Wolf, economic historian Niall Ferguson, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos (think e-reader Kindle), Apple’s Steve Jobs (think iPad), Google’s Sergei Brin and Larry Page, columnists and authors Thomas Friedman, Fareed Zakaria and Malcolm Gladwell, green venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, statesmen Kishore Mahbubani and Henry Kissinger.
Mr Nilekani’s Imagining India also figures in Foreign Policy’s ‘20 most recommended books from the planet’s movers and shakers’ at No. 17.